I liked Batman Begins, but in the lead up to it everyone was raving about "Nolan is is this great innovative director, he;s bringing realism and scale to the movie, it'll be serious" etc. and I thought "Oh man, that sounds incredible.

Then it comes out, and as I said, I liked it...but it was small. Small thematically and story-wise, small visually. I didn't like the shot-in-studio look and feel of it, and I certainly didn't like all the smoke/steam around the place, which contributed not only to the loss of big backgrounds, but in making the movie feel 'out of time'. The whole thing...felt like something that would've been made in the late-90's. Nolan hadn't yet 'modernised'. The first half is almost what I was hoping for, but still not shot quite right for my liking. For everything he was going for, Nolan didn't really have the ability to pull off modern, big scale cinema on a visual level yet. But there was promise there.

The Prestige is when I really took notice of Nolan. THAT was something else. Visually it was still '90's sensibleness Nolan', but everything else was incredible. The characters and the way they effected the plot and story, and vice versa. Dealing with consequences of each action, moralistic battles both internal and external. These were things I'd hope he'd carry into The Dark Knight and he did.

Then The Dark Knight came, and WOW. Incredible writing, the structure, the pace, the characters...everything. And FINALLY, he and Pfister became visually modern. Big open frames, clear crisp colours while maintaining the 'real' feel of film (not video-ish digital of many modern movies), real locations...it was a sight to behold, truly. Prior to this, I never had a favourite movie. My default was The Empire Strikes Back, but I never really locked it in place. TDK took the spot with furious gusto. I consider TDKR very nearly equal to it, and even better than it in many regards...so basically they share top spot in my mind. I found TDK a bit more 'tense', which I enjoy in movies, so that puts it a hair ahead. Since I was little, there have been SO many things I wanted comic book movies to do, boundaries top push, both superficially and story wise that TDK and TDKR finally managed to do.

So yeah. I consider BB a very solid but disappointingly pedestrian opener, with potential for a lot of great things to come...that, thankfully were delivered on and then some.

So you didn't like Batman Begins because it didn't feel 'modern' enough to you, but your default favorite film at the time was Empire Strikes Back??

'Modern' doesn't dictate the quality of a film for me personally. Especially if your definition of modern is stylistic cliches of the time. Thank god Begins did it's own thing in that case.